A few months ago we published a photo of a mosaic showing a mermaid saying 'you gotta fight for your right to be arty!' into a speech bubble. The shot had been taken in Chiswick and we challenged readers to name its location.

A few responses came in, but none as passionate as a letter from a resident who said she knew just where it was and that it was an eyesore.

When I visited Baroness Carrie Von Reichardt in her mosaic-fronted home in Fairlawn Grove, she showed me her mosaic wall at the back of her property.

Created in the memory of her late penpal Luis Ramirez, a Texan death row inmate executed in October 2005 for the murder of a taxi driver, the memorial wall contains his last spoken words and an eclectic and fascinating array of human rights-related soundbytes which have been ceramicised into hand-crafted tiles and set into the surface.

The baronesss walked me through the artwork, explaining each cluster of intricately placed tiles. Standing in the bitter cold in that quiet Chiswick road, staring through an inch of clear resin at the Texas prisoner ID of a deceased death row inmate, I wished I could afford to be her neighbour.

Von Reichardt's self-bestowed title, by the way, draws on a connection with the last tsar of Russia, who made her grandfather an honorary general for helping allied forces in the First World War.

"My parents lived in this house when they were first married, then it became my sister's. Now I live in it," said the 41-year old mosaic artist and ceramicist of the Treatment Rooms, her home and studio.

For 12 years now, Carrie, who lives with her partner Thayen, a commercial artist and their three children (11-year-old Poppy, Rudy, 5, and Roxy, 2) has been working hard to make her parents marital home (which is actually owned by her sister) her own.

Eight years ago she started to mosaic the front of her house. As a way of polishing off the project, she painted on her own blue plaque.

A born and bred Chiswickian, the off-beat artist says the community she knew as a child, growing up in Sutton Court Road, has long since been sidelined.

"The only people who haven't liked my house are the people who bought into the area because it's retail heaven.

"Now it's all about money and is incredibly posh but Chiswick has a much older history of having bohemian areas. You see, it was BBC land and it always had a reputation of being arty and cerebral."

Carrie showed me the famous roof attachment to her award-winning vehicle, Tiki Love Truck, parked outside her house. Famous because it won the Best Decorated in the UK's first ever Art Car Parade in Manchester, but more so because it is fitted with a death mask.

Last August in 100 plus degree heat, in a cabin in the back woods of Texas, Carrie helped mould the death mask of Ramirez's best friend, John Joe "Ash" Amador, 30 minutes after his execution.

Texas, Carrie told me, is the only state where you can transport the body of a executed inmate from the prison to the morge yourself.

Together with sculptor and Alabama 3 band member Nick Reynolds (son of the great train robber Bruce Reynolds) Carrie and Ash's family took his body in a van to the remote spot, turned the air conditioning on full blast, and started making the cast.

"He was still warm. If it weren't for air conditioning it would have been horrendous.

"Ash knew he was going to have a death mask. He said to me, that's what Egyptian kings get'. I learned from Luis that I should have done things while he was alive. My greatest regret was that he never saw the wall. I told him, I will immortalise you on my back wall'.

"They want to be remembered for more than the crime they are being executed for."

It all started when Carrie, who has always been opposed to capital punishment, responded to a Big Issue advert asking people to write to prisoners.

"They sent a name back to me, Luis Ramirez. That was June of 2000 and I had all the preconceptions associated with writing to someone who is a murderer. But what happened completely blew me away."

She said over those five years of correspondence, she met her partner, had two children and started to mosaic her house. "His conditions were so severe. It has given me a greater sense of value for my life."

Luis, said Carrie, was found guilty of serving in a contract killing of an off-duty fireman by an all-white jury in a mostly hispanic town and convicted, she added, on evidence that would never hold up in a court of law in Britain.

Two days before he was executed in October 2005 she went to Texas to meet him for the first time. "How do you sit across from someone knowing that in two days they are going to be executed? These people teach you, too. They become deeply spiritual people because they have to."

Her latest penpal is Herman Wallace of the Angola 3, who has been locked down in solitary confinement, campaigners say unjustly, in Louisiana for 35 years.

As we went to press Carrie had just been named co-ordinator of the London Chapter to free the Angola 3. Herman, she added, hopes to be freed in the next few months and has promised to make the Treatment Rooms one of his first stops when he comes to the UK.

With a sculpture degree in mosaics, the prisoner-friendly artist already celebrated for a bra she sculpted out of latex pig's heads, also spends her days continuing to develop a technique of putting images into ceramics.

When I question the legality of tiling the all the colours of the rainbow onto the front of a house situated in glossy W4, she said: "It's just surface decoration, not structural, and it's not a conservation area. We live in grey - grey flooded by advertising - so I think it's lovely to have a bit of colour in your world."

More often people tell her they incorporate her house into their daily routes because their children want to see it. However, she doesn't deny hers is not everyone's taste.

"Once after I finished a project, my Irish neighbour said to me a bit horrified, 'Carrie why have you gone and put skeletons on your house? But they must have taken you ages'," said the baroness in her best Irish accent.

"It's the craftwork people respect - it's that Gaudí thing, isn't it?"